Life as Couple #117: Camping 101: Now with Children

I have a good excuse for the week long absence. We went camping. With a child. Well, technically, with 3 children, but only one came from our house. The moral of this story is that camping with a child takes a week, if not more, of prep, even if you are only going away for 2 days.

Though we've known about this trip for months and months, as things do, it crept up. A couple of weeks ago we finally evaluated the status of our camping equipment. Something we'd talked about doing since we planned the trip in February. You see, we hadn't been camping in oh, 6 years. Apparently, 6 years renders camping equipment MIA. At least in our household.

The good news is we still had our tent, the Kelty Mantra 7. When we bought it (read: invested in it) 7 years ago, it was the biggest and best one on the market. I guess that's why we were smart and chose to store it in the attic, not the garage. Even these many years later it was in perfect condition. Outside of a lamp and a mallot, there wasn't much else that remained in perfect condition or, apparently, in our possession.

And so the list making began. D spent an hour on the phone talking with Alisha, as the two of them were in charge of the meals. Wednesday evening before the trip, I hit the road armed with my supermarket list and my Target list. I figured two, maybe three hours and we'd be ready to go. I'd pack the car on Thursday night and be ready to hit the road late Friday morning. It appears that in our years of not camping, Target has decided to not have a very flush camping section. Two Targets and an REI later we finally had the stuff we needed to camp. And I still had to hit up the market. Needless to say, we got away later than planned on Friday, but managed to get to Greenfield NH in the early afternoon. Dora spent most of the drive through Nowhere NH lamenting about the need to live there but the lack of jobs. Indeed. I'm pretty certain cows outnumber humans where we were.

We managed to remember how to put up the tent while Arden took off with Bryce to explore the site. We had a great, albeit too short, time and are so happy that Juli and Alisha invited us to their annual Father's Day weekend camping experience. We swam in the lake, made s'mores, took the girls for bike rides and slept under the stars. We had perfect weather.

Due to the camera issue I have woefully few pictures....but I tried!

Locked and loaded. We need a bigger SUV, ours was packed to the gills. As you can see, Lucy joined us.